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Weak XXX

23 July 2012

No. 1,537 (cartoon)

I’m lost in thought.

You’re just lost.

Thought is unfamiliar terrain.

24 July 2012

Military-Agricultural Complex

As I noted a couple of years ago, Indians have weaponized the bhut jolokia chili. Anuj Baruah, a biotechnologist and bhut jolokia dealer, has managed to extract ninety percent capsaicin from bhut jolokias. As a result, the Defense Research Laboratory in Tezpur, Assam, is now one of his clients.

The military hasn’t revealed anything about a chili arsenal, but the Central Reserve Police Force is using bhut jolokia grenades against stone-throwing protesters in Kashmir.

Assamese farmers are benefiting from the military-agricultural complex. Their dried peppers command over thirty dollars a kilogram, twelve times their average daily wage.

Oh dear, this is going nowhere. I have no idea why I’m regurgitating a litany of facts and figures; I apologize for not being ambitious enough to disseminate lies and deception. I’m taking early retirement today, and shall resume my disinformation campaign tomorrow.

25 July 2012

Baby Donations

Have a newborn baby you don’t want? You can drop it off at any fire station in San Francisco for free, and with impunity. Public works bureaucrats initiated the program in 1958—two years before the first birth control pill was widely available—in response to dead babies shutting down the sewage treatment plants. I have no idea what the firefighters do when someone donates wee bairn or two. They must ship them off to some foster farm; where else would firefighters come from?

26 July 2012

Gratuitous Photo of the Weak: Overexposed Stairwell

Nikon Incorporated is, in theory, repairing my camera. That’s not the case in practice, though; I haven’t seen it in weeks. And so, I decided to test the camera built into one of my electronic doodads. It has five million pixels, but no way to adjust the amount of light that falls on them. As a result, every photograph I’ve taken with it has absolutely no detail in the highlights, making it all but useless.

Feh.

27 July 2012

There Won’t Be Cake

Tomorrow is Marcel Duchamp’s one hundred and twenty-fifth birthday. There won’t be cake. Perhaps champagne?

28 July 2012

Ink and Paper and Zeros and Ones

Hannah and Rivka asked me to meet them in a bookstore, so I did. I haven’t looked at books made with ink and paper in a very long time. Even though most of them were lovely objects, the idea of storing and accessing information in that format is of little interest.

When I was young, I imagined there’d be at least one huge volume of my work in print by now. There isn’t, and I’m not disappointed. Perhaps I’ve gone too far into the conceptual realm, but I like the idea of my words and images replicated in the form of billions of zeros and ones. Putting ink on paper seems like a strange way to disseminate and store data.

29 July 2012

The Wrong Thing?

Tracy asked me if I was sure that I was doing the wrong thing. I appreciated the question; it’s one of the few queries where both positive and negative answers are usually correct.

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©2012 David Glenn Rinehart